Your particular skull photo comes from the Regional Museum of Ica, in Peru. That's what the letters "MRI" on the skull stands for in Spanish. It's part of a display of Mayan deformed skulls. Here is a clearer shot where you can see the description in Spanish on the specimen card.

Here is link to the museum main web page, but I had to run it through Google Bablefish to translate it which hosed the formatting. Click on the "deformation of Skulls" bullet on the lower right to see the whole display.

Not much out there on the web, but the single source I could find ( An environmental history of the world, Johnson Donald Hughes) cited an average lifespan in the 30's with a 40% infant mortality rate.

If that's true that was a lot of skull stretching. I hope our society never gets that obcessed with beauty. There are already the neck stretchers. add to it theskull stretchers and we might as well all go to the looney ben.

If that's true that was a lot of skull stretching. I hope our society never gets that obcessed with beauty. There are already the neck stretchers. add to it theskull stretchers and we might as well all go to the looney ben.

It's been suggested from the other artifacts which usually accompany these elongated skulls in graves that they belong to a group of high priests and priestesses whose cult objectives were not strictly to do with notions of 'beauty' so much as giving the outward appearence of 'other worldliness'....... as a means of establishing their 'special relationship' and direct connections with the Gods over the simpler people who filled their bellies and bolstered the decadent lifestyles which lead to such drastic self mutilations in the course of their service.

It's thought the mothers of the priests tightly strapped pieces of wood to the sides of the babies heads whilst the bone was still soft and this forced the skulls to then emerge in this way. Not too dissimilar a process to the later oriental practise of foot binding for royal concubines......